“Roadtrip till Matopos Nationalpark” was first published on my Swedish Blog.
When you’re volunteering on Chipangali Wildlife Orphanage, you also need to go to Matopos, where they track leopards and hyenas. They go either once a week, or every other week, it all depends on time and other circumstances.
Our task when I was part of the mission was to set traps with new meat and camouflage them, and even put up new cameras.
The weather was pretty miserable while our visit, but I had the honour of sitting inside the car, so I didn’t really mind, and to be perfectly honest I thought the rain much more pleasant than had it been sizzling hot sun, because apparently I’m embarrassingly weak as soon as the sun shows its rays!
Heatstroke every other minute apparently!
I discovered there was this fun toy called a “slasher”. It’s all in the wrist! The photo above is me holding a machete of some kind – daddy was terrified we went out to the park without weapons, so I sent him this pic. I thought it would calm him down… 🙂Â
There’s not that much to write about the event, so I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. It was a completely magical landscape, to be truthful, and all the rocks are apparently typical of Matopos/Matobo National Park. Really just so beautiful!
If you go to Zimbabwe you simply must plan a visit to Matobo. The wildlife might be slim, but the beautiful landscape and scenery is well worth it!
In these amazing views we stumped around searching for leopards and hyenas, but we didn’t see a single soul.
The animals we in fact did see were giraffes, zebras, wildebeests and cows (!):
And a whole heap of baboons and vervet monkeys, of course, since they are everywhere!
And we also found the occasional ex-animal, spiders and weird trees…
Needless to say, I loved Matopos, and it was a nice break from work. We slept in tents and it was basically just a camp feeling about it. Totally cozy!
Padawan & Ponderer 